Ashley Simone (ed.)

Michael Webb
Two Journeys

Two Journeys is the first comprehensive monograph on the work of Michael Webb, an artist and trained architect, who operates at the intersection of the two disciplines. The publication assembles sixty years of Webb’s work into a continuously evolving narrative about the multifaceted relationships among the built environment, landscape, and moving vehicles.

The artist’s work investigates these relationships using notions of time, space, and speed, and analogue drawing tools such as pencil and collage, which are often rendered later in oil paint. Webb is widely known for creatively exploring the boundaries of drawing techniques, specifically perspectival projection. Some of his works were created in collaboration with Archigram, an avant-garde group in London, of which he was a co-founder in 1961.

The book features nearly 200 drawings: artistic works rooted in analytical thinking and structured around architectural elements and notational systems. Two Journeys includes essays by Kenneth Frampton and Mark Wigley, amongst others, whose critical perspective alongside texts and commentaries by Webb shed light on an extraordinary body of work.

Two Journeys is the first comprehensive monograph on the work of Michael Webb, an artist and trained architect, who operates at the intersection of the two disciplines. The publication assembles sixty years of Webb’s work into a continuously evolving narrative about the multifaceted relationships among the built environment, landscape, and moving vehicles.

The artist’s work investigates these relationships using notions of time, space, and speed, and analogue drawing tools such as pencil and collage, which are often rendered later in oil paint. Webb is widely known for creatively exploring the boundaries of drawing techniques, specifically perspectival projection. Some of his works were created in collaboration with Archigram, an avant-garde group in London, of which he was a co-founder in 1961.

The book features nearly 200 drawings: artistic works rooted in analytical thinking and structured around architectural elements and notational systems. Two Journeys includes essays by Kenneth Frampton and Mark Wigley, amongst others, whose critical perspective alongside texts and commentaries by Webb shed light on an extraordinary body of work.

Edited by Ashley Simone

Foreword by Ashley Simone

With essays by Kenneth Frampton, Michael Sorkin, Mark Wigley, Lebbeus Woods

Design: Integral Lars Müller

21 × 28 cm, 8 ¼ × 11 in

206 pages, 284 illustrations

hardback

2018, 978-3-03778-554-6, English
CHF 40.00

Michael Webb

Michael Webb was born in Henley-on-Thames, England, in 1937. He studied architecture intermittently at the University of Westminster between the years 1953 and 1962. A project he designed during his fourth year found its way, owing to a curious set of circumstances, into Visionary Architecture, an exhibition held at the Museum of modern Art, New York in 1960. In 1961 he was invited by Peter Cook to be part of an assortment of young architects who referred to themselves as the Archigram group; they published a magazine with the same title. The group rebelled against what it saw as the failure of the architectural establishment in Britain to produce buildings reflecting the dynamic changes, both technological and social, the country was then undergoing.
Webb emigrated to the USA in 1965. As a professor of architecture, he taught for more than fifty years at institutions that include the Architectural Association, Columbia University, The Cooper Union, the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Pratt Institute, Rhode Island School of Design, and Virginia Tech.
In 2010 and 2011 he was a fellow at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Webb has received grants from the New York State Council on the Arts and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

Ashley Simone

ASHLEY SIMONE is a New York City–based editor, photographer, and professor of architecture at Pratt Institute. The intersection of art, culture, and the built environment is the focus of her practice that draws on her training as an architect at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Her photography has been exhibited in New York and London and featured in journals and magazines that include Architectural Design and Interior Design. She is the editor of A Genealogy of Modern Architecture:
Comparative Critical Analysis of Built Form (Lars Müller, 2015) and Absurd Thinking Between Art and Design (Lars Müller, 2017).